Iqbal Latif
Look at the picture first. Vladimir Putin holding a selfie stick, 10 heads of government leaning into the frame, a Trump inset in the corner, and a caption in red: the BRICS alliance challenges the dollar’s global dominance as Russia reports that more than 90% of trade is settled in local currencies. It is a composite, not a photograph of the New Delhi summit, and Putin has never held a selfie stick in his life. The picture is fake and the number is real, and it is the real number that is doing the lying. Before the arithmetic, though, a question I was asked 36 years ago.
In 1990, when I drove out of Kuwait after the invasion and crossed Iran by road, I stopped in Tehran for a few days. The first question anyone asked a foreigner, in the street, at the hotel, at the exchange counter, was the title of this essay. Do you have dollars. Not rials, not rubbles, not gold. Dollars. The Islamic Republic has spent every year since as the fiercest enemy of the dollar on earth. Look at Tehran this week. The free-market rate was 2,351,000 rials to the dollar on 13 September, after a record 2,375,000 on 11 September, 47% worse than 6 months ago. The rial is not priced against a basket, or against the yuan, or against anything the declaration mentions. It is priced against the thing the state has spent 47 years denouncing. The Iranian rate trackers describe the dollar in their own words as the anchor currency of Iran’s free market, against which nearly every other currency, gold and many goods are priced. That is not my characterisation of a BRICS member’s economy. It is the description used by the people who run the counter.
The fiercest enemies of the dollar are its fiercest holders, because everything they must buy is quoted in it. Oil is quoted in dollars. Gold is quoted in dollars. Even the cryptocurrencies invented to abolish the fiat dollar are quoted in dollars, and the first thing anyone asks about one is what it is worth in dollars. You cannot escape a unit of account by trading in something else. I set this down in 1998 and called it the Denomination Paradox: anything priced in dollars cannot replace the dollar, because it borrows the dollar’s ruler to state its own value.
Now the caption. On 8 September 2026, 4 days before the summit, Dmitry Peskov told Indian journalists that 90% of Russia’s payments and transactions with BRICS countries are conducted in national currencies. Russia’s. Not the bloc’s. Putin used the same 90% in May 2024 for settlements between Russia and China alone. And Peskov said the opposite of what the caption claims: “It’s not because we are aiming for de-dollarisation, for getting rid of US dollars. No, no, to the contrary.” Russia is open to any acceptable method of payment. Asked about the Indian rupees its companies cannot spend, he said the problem is gradually being resolved and gave no figure. That is not a challenge to the dollar. It is a country describing its own cage to the journalists of the country holding the key.
And settling in national currencies does not remove the dollar from the trade. The price is still set in dollars and then converted. The oil is priced in dollars, the invoice is converted, the rupees pile up in Mumbai and Moscow asks Delhi what is for sale. The dollar left the receipt. It never left the price.
Set the true number beside the false one. In April 2025 the BIS found the dollar on 1 side of 89.2% of all foreign exchange trades, up from 88.4% in 2022, on turnover of $9.6 trillion a day. Up. Across the 3 years in which the dollar’s decline was announced weekly, its share rose. The yuan carries about 3% of the payments messaged through SWIFT. More than $10 trillion crosses JPMorgan’s payment rails every day. 1 American bank, in 1 day, moves more money than the whole Russian economy produces in 5 years at market prices. And behind the pipes stand the 2 questions that decide reserve status. Who arbitrates Hormuz, Suez, Bab al Mandab, the seabed cables and the clearing that settles the cargo? The United States, and nobody at the Delhi table. Whose debt does the world keep its savings in? The American Treasury market. I wrote 20 years ago that whoever holds the chokepoints holds the money, and in April 2024 that someone’s debt is someone else’s savings.
Last, the declaration the picture pretends to summarise. Clause 90 acknowledges a payment task force, notes work on interoperability, mentions local currency settlement while respecting national priorities, and records that there is no one size fits all approach. No common currency. No operator. No rail. No date. And on Saturday 12 September, after the summit closed, India’s own Secretary for Economic Relations, Sudhakar Dalela, told the briefing: “There is no proposal in the BRICS for a BRICS currency as of now.” The host said it from the podium on the day the meme began to travel.
De dollarisation consumes most of them. It fills the communiqués, the task forces, the 17 summits and the 140 paragraphs, and at the end of it the oil is still priced in dollars and the man in Tehran still asks for them by name. What a fake agreement. What a fake pursuit.
